


cinderheart

by fitzefitcher



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: As One Does, Gen, Ghosts, Horde-centric, Minor Character Death, Minor Injuries, POV Second Person, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and doesn't realize they're gaining shamanic abilities, local peon wigs the fuck out, starts seeing shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 07:11:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18231614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzefitcher/pseuds/fitzefitcher
Summary: In the wake of disaster, we learn to survive. We learn to rebuild.





	cinderheart

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this one for a pretty long time, actually. it's supposed to be based on the experiences of my ironman toon back in cata, but it's bofa and she's like, level 43 lmao. maybe I'll come back to this, but if I do, it won't be for a long while. but I'm still pretty happy with this, and as it stands now, it's pretty okay as a story I think, so rather than let it collect dust in my unfinished drafts I figured I'd post it here.
> 
> enjoy.

You shave your head today.

It’s the first time it’s ever been cut, let alone by you, so it’s slow and messy and you’re left with far too many nicks, scalp stinging all over and the dull little knife you had found now covered in hair, the edge of it splattered with droplets of dark blood. Your head is lighter and the lack of weight throws you off, the breeze cool on your scalp as you run through the wastes as through flames were licking at your heels, but you are less likely to be recognized this way. Not that there are many who would- being a peon meant that you weren’t worth remembering, that you were worth less than nothing, but if you are recognized, you will go back to being just that. So you shave off your matted, blue-black hair, cover the scars on your shoulders, and sprint through the desert as though you were aflame.

\---

When you get to the Valley of Trials a day or so later, the first thing you do is drink all the water you can get your hands on, on the verge of blacking out right as stumble into the den. Stupidly, when you ran from the labor camp the other day, you didn’t think to take supplies with you. You were never the cleverest or bravest, or had any distinct traits to speak of, really, other than your timidness, your lack of will, and this is why you were made a peon to start with. No obvious talent, and no drive to go after what you wanted. You are weak, and you have no clan to claim you, no great deed to your name.

After you recover some, you help around the ranch there, tending to the pigs in exchange for the farmer’s hand-me-downs, simple cotton clothing and a worn leather satchel. You’re not picky, however, and shed the kilt you stole from some burning blade underling you had the misfortune of meeting in the wastes. You try not to think of the warlock’s face when you broke their neck while you help the farmer kill a coyote that got into the pens, unconsciously grabbing it and snapping its neck with your bare hands. It was frighteningly easy to do, and you were not aware of the expanse of your physical strength. It’s hard to think of yourself as strong when you were reminded every waking moment that you weren’t. This power is new to you.

You help out the cooks as well, bringing them what little fruit the desert can offer, and one of them even lets you keep the extra bit of food that the grunts didn’t finish off. This sort of kindness is unexpected, and you manage to keep a straight face rather than one of complete surprise when they give you the remaining cactus apples and some coin for your trouble. You’re trying to not make it obvious what you once were, but it’s difficult. You have not yet outgrown your shackles, unthinkingly doing what you’re told without question before realizing slightly too late that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. A novel concept, that.

You try to keep this in mind as you pass by the foreman there, try not to make it completely transparent that you’re militantly avoiding him, and you think you’re successful for the most part. This man has done you no wrong, he is not your foreman, but you cannot bring yourself to go near him. Your foreman is dead, his passing an accident during the construction of the new blockade in front of Orgrimmar, but you still feel his lingering leer on you, even now. You still feel him leering at you from when he thought you shiftless and slacking, when he punished you and added more scars to your back, when he died and rose above his body like smoke, his eyes the last sparks of coal being blown out. That vision was what made you run, and you keep seeing your foreman on this one’s face, keep seeing his face in the smoke.

The smoke whispers to you sometimes, in hisses and waves of heat, and you’re not sure what to do with this. You ignore it, for now, and pray that you do not draw attention to yourself when you catch yourself staring too deeply through the bonfire.

\---

You leave again after a few days, made anxious when the grunts guarding the Den begin to make plans of clearing out the cave to the north infested with more Burning Blade underlings, and make grumblings of recruiting locals to help. Your killing that warlock from the other day was a fluke, this you know; you merely acted out of fear and instinct, and the chances of this being a repeat occurrence are very slim. Strong you may be, but this does not make you any less a coward.

And besides, some of the shamans have seen you staring into the fire too long, have looked at you curiously as if you were seeing the same things they were. You have to leave; you can’t risk being caught so soon after just because you can’t stop yourself from looking, can’t stop from checking if his face is still there, gazing at you with confused shock. You’re beginning to suspect that this is going to become a permanent fixture in your new life, and that isn’t at all reassuring.

You take off for Sen’jin first thing in the morning, before anyone can notice or approach you, and arrive that afternoon. The journey is easier, this time- you have what you need to cross the desert, and there’s no one in the Den that would look for you when you left. You made sure of that.

\---

You end up leaving Sen’jin Village too, after a few days and you become restless and anxious. It’s your own fault; you got caught again, the shamans and witch doctors eyeing you up when you, again, stare too deeply into the bonfire in the center of the village. Initially, you are perfectly content to help them- anything to establish yourself further as a person and not a peon- but their seers stare through you, noticing something you are not, and crack crooked grins at you like it’s a joke you’re in on when you realize you are staring again and realize they are staring at you. You are learning this is not something you can help, though; the fire’s glow draws you in like an insect, and again you can see something flickering in the flame, in the discolor it leaves in your vision, constantly switching between the face of your former foreman and something else, something within the fire itself that is alive and not alive, something that whispers to you in wisps of smoke and crackles of sparks.

This is why you leave, again, deer-skittish and frightened of staying in one place for too long, like something is licking at your heels even now.

\---

When you get to Razor Hill, it’s already well into the night. You find some shelter behind the inn to bed down; you should be alright there until morning, or so you thought, until the innkeeper found you there in the early hours of the morning.

It’s an easy enough living compared to what you’re used to; after catching you sleeping outside behind the inn, the innkeeper lets you stay there in exchange for your working for him, doing odd jobs and the like, and you start helping the leather workers as well in exchange for learning the trade. You are unexpectedly good at this- your hands, though large and calloused, are steady and careful, and you are better with the tools than you ever hoped to be. You had just wanted to not be terrible at this, the sting of your shackles so fresh in your mind still, and here you are not just doing alright at something, but excelling at it.

You manage to avoid the faces you see in the fire for the most part in that you avoid fire if you can altogether. It’s hot enough that you don’t need its heat at night to keep warm, and you are content to eat mostly fruits and vegetables rather than use a fire to cook anything. This, however, is before the innkeeper notices that you haven’t eaten meat for the past few days and shoves some pork under your nose when you return to the inn one night. The next day, he sends you off to the cooks to learn from them so that you can “do more around the inn.”

Learning this is a strange experience in that most of your concentration is used to resolutely not look into the cooking fire, to ignore the strange hisses that no one else seems to hear. The first few dishes you make or help with are burned, mostly because the fire seems to be trying to get your attention, expanding rapidly and leaping up with a shower of sparks when you ignore it. The cooks are at a loss of what to say to this, because the fire flaring up to meet you when you approach it is not normally something that happens. One laughs about your bad luck, and another speculates that it might be this dry weather, because they were having this same problem just the other day, _it’s not your fault, kid, it just hasn’t rained in months, wasn’t it strange that the dry season came really early this year, and hey, you heard what happened to that labor camp, right? A wildfire broke out not a month ago_ and this is where you stop listening, numb with fear, and instead find yourself gazing into the fire. It calms significantly, speaking in low hisses and gasps. You do not understand what it says.

It was the last month of true summer when you left the labor camp, the sun’s pressing heat the heaviest it could be and withering everything it touched. This is why the wildfire started. Between the sun’s unrelenting gaze and something stirring within the earth that you are just starting become aware of, this is why the wildfire grew so quickly and devoured everything in its path, including the man that has scarred your back so many times that you no longer know how many marks are there.

\---

You are still in Razor Hill when the rainy season hits.

It's sorely needed after such a bad dry season- bad enough that Orgrimmar itself had caught fire, you hear from the innkeeper while he talks to a grunt at the bar and you are washing dishes just behind him- but the rain is very odd, you think, it feels odd, and you don't quite know why until days later when it still hasn't stopped or let up in the least, and when the innkeeper has you wait on the grunts that come to the inn, you pick up hints and tidbits of them discussing preparing sandbags to distribute among the townspeople, of their superiors growing wary of this unrelenting rain, particularly so right after the Warchief himself has left to investigate why there had been so many fires, why now the land is overcompensating with this rain. They speak of other things, too, the tauren guards mumbling mutinously about the sudden and unfortunate death of their chieftain while the troll guards nod along conspiratorially, both openly critical of the one the Warchief had chosen to take his place while he was gone.

However, all of this becomes irrelevant when the earth itself opens up with a great and terrible quake, and suddenly elementals of all kinds begin pouring out of the gaping chasm that splits the Barrens right in two. The shore floods, and you are so, so lucky that this town and Sen'jin don't get swept away with it. Razor Hill remains untouched for the most part, but the troll village has water running through the center of it for days on end, until finally it begins to recede. The trolls, for the most part, don't worry too much; they've been prepared for this kind of flooding for a long time, longer than you know, probably, their buildings propped up above the ground for the seawater that has come to greet them for better or worse. The Echo Isles have the same reaction, you hear as you're helping the innkeeper prepare food and bandages; they're unharmed by the floods for the most part, and mostly are waiting impatiently for the water levels to go back down. However, Razor Hill continues to be a flurry of frantic activity, despite being untouched, because the Southfury River has decided that it would like take part, as well.

In the coming days, when the sea water finally recedes, the river doesn't, and an invasive wetland that forms over an alarmingly short number of days starts taking back the land from the farmers caught unawares there, the flora and fauna moving in as if it had been there for years. The town forms a search party, and while you manage to dodge taking part in this, the innkeeper instructs you to go and help out around town, and you manage to nod and keep the knee-jerk panic and anxiety off of your face at the thought of interacting with people you don't know are "safe."

Rationally, you know that this reaction has no logical standing- it's been long enough that no one is looking for you, because nobody bothers to look for missing peons that long, and even if they were, no one would recognize you. Your hair has grown back in some during your time here, growing in unruly blue-black tufts that stick out every which way, and you no longer wear the ragged work clothes you had when you ran. You now wear the simple cotton clothing you had been given by the farmer in the Den, a baggy, cream-white blouse and brown breeches that cover all of your scars, and leather boots you have made yourself.

You burned your old work clothes as soon as you could. This is the one thing you did to make sure no one would catch you other than fervently hope and pray.

You are directed towards the goblin heading the salvage operations, and in the midst of her instructing you of what to do, you think- you think that she's flirting with you. You're not really sure how to deal with this, because you're not- you're not really sure what she thinks you are. You're not really sure what you are. Probably not what she's looking for, given that you witness her aggressively talking up some of the guardsmen but then spitting venom at the women. You have breasts, yes, but small ones, consumed by the musculature of your body and easily hidden under your baggy blouse. While you’re tall enough to dwarf most of your fellows, you are not as large as your more masculine kin, you, a tower and they, fortresses. Still, your androgyny is enough to give people pause, the troll and tauren guards you wait on unsure of how to address you when you serve them. The other orcs don’t seem to care, whatever the case is, so long as you get them their food. You don't say anything to her either way, because least of all do you want to cause trouble.

She directs you to the shoreline, and while normally you’d be very pleased about this, your first visit to the ocean officially instead of just looking at it from afar, the experience is ruined somewhat by the debris and corpses everywhere. Still, you try not to let it stop you from collecting any sort of usable scrap you can get your hands on, piling them up a little ways from the destruction so that the guards can come by later to get it. Mostly, you’re glad that you weren’t told to deal with the bodies of the drowned. Just being near them is nearly too much for you to deal with, and you can’t help but flinch away from them when you accidentally glance over and spot one staring at you with cloudy, glazed-over eyes.

After a few hours of this, at around sunset the grunts arrive and take all the scraps you’ve found, and you go with them, helping them load the metal, wood, and tech that hasn’t been waterlogged too badly onto a large cart, you following close behind when they head back in. You turn to take one last look at the ocean, and nearly freeze in place when for a moment you see multiple people standing there, people that weren’t there moments before, and they disappear just as soon as you blink.

You don’t stop shaking until you get back to the inn that night. You sleep close to the hearth fire, the innkeeper insisting when he sees you come in, shivering and still drenched with water and salt. He won’t stop fussing over you as he dries you off with a towel, especially when you say (offhandedly) that you were there by yourself all day. You have to kneel down so that he can actually reach your hair, and his grumbling about how little help you had, _why didn’t they send anyone with you, you could have been hurt,_ is muffled by the towel as he scrubs relentlessly at your head. You’re not sure what you did to deserve this sort of attention, clearly you don’t, but you appreciate it, all the same.

After a moment he realizes he’s not going to get anywhere until you get into some dry clothes, and makes you hand over your wet clothing and wash off all the salt in a wooden tub he drags in front of the hearth. The only people there besides you and him are the two guards at their post just outside, everyone else having settled in for the night. Nudity isn’t really something that should matter, you know, but you still get nervous about your body with or without your clothes covering your skin. You appreciate the semblance of privacy here. The water is lukewarm but still much, much better than the frigid ocean was, turning cold fast with the changing of the seasons, and you wash up as quickly as you can while the innkeeper gets you clothes that you can borrow. He comes back before you can finish, setting the dry clothes aside while he sets up the wet ones on a line to dry near the hearth. He doesn’t say anything about the scars on your back. He sees them, you know he does, but he doesn’t say anything about them, just continues to complain that no one even attempted to help you while he picks up around the inn and does the dishes you were supposed to do. You feel a little bad about that, but he doesn’t say anything about that, either.

You finish up and get dressed, but before you can go to your usual spot, a bedroll tucked in a back corner where no one can see you easily, the innkeeper turns you around and shoves you towards the hearth.

“You’ll catch a cold if you sleep there after being cold and soaking wet all day,” he scolds. He takes your bedroll and sets it up near the fire, leaving you no room for argument. He bids you a good night brusquely and goes up to his own room, leaving you to sleep. You lie down, and drift off as the fire whispers quietly to you. You don’t understand it, still, but the crackling voice is soothing.

\---

You head back to the beach the very next day.

The innkeeper is decidedly not happy about this, but Razor Hill still needs supplies, and the guard captain doesn’t know when they’ll be getting them next with how big a mess everything is. You are happy to help, even if that means going back to the beach where you know you saw something you shouldn’t have.

You’re trembling again by the time you get there, teeth and fists clenched anxiously, but from the looks of it, you’re at least not by yourself, this time. One of the guards is there, surprisingly, sorting through the new wreckage the sea has brought ashore, and she waves at you when you make your way down the beach. She’s a bit worse for wear, bags under her eyes like she hasn’t slept in days, and her thick, black hair falling out of its braid. You thought that all of the guards were still conducting the search party, but you do appreciate the one that has stayed behind. You wave back, and she smiles at you around her tusks.

The two of you work together silently, and with two of you, you can now put the scraps you find into organized piles by what they are instead of stacking everything into one pile. This continues for some time, and around noon, you stop to eat, bringing out the fruit you had packed for this. You offer some to the guard, but she doesn’t take it, for some reason, and just stares into the ocean. She looks exhausted. You try to offer it to her again, but she still won’t take it and won’t give any reason as to why. You finish eating quickly, a little unsettled, and as soon as you do, she wordlessly gets up and starts dragging one of the bodies a little ways off from your scrap piles. It’s another guard like her, his armor sticky with salt and still wet from the ocean. She drags him away from the wreckage, and straightens out his body, arms by his sides and legs straight down, and closes his eyelids so that his milky-eyed gaze does not linger.

You glance over to the scrap pile; you’ve collected a decent amount so far today, already close to what you had gathered by yourself yesterday. You can put some time into honoring the dead now that you’ve collected enough for the living to work with. It’s gruesome work, and you hate it, you hate it so, so much because you swear, they’re staring at you as you do it, but it’s not as bad as it could be, you know; at least you have the guard with you. Before long, you’ve cleared away a relatively decent part of the beach, the bodies of the drowned lined up next to each other and placed delicately as if they were merely sleeping.

You really wish the guard had eaten something when you had earlier, because she’s starting to look ill, bags under her eyes pronounced, skin sallow and gleaming with sweat. You offer her something again, because you had some left, but she still won’t take it, shaking her head angrily like she can’t. You’re scared. You don’t know why you’re scared, don’t know why she just won’t take it, but the two of you just keep going, dragging corpses up the beach until you don’t know if your hands are trembling from strain or from fear.

You trot over to the next one, trying to keep up with her as she moves too quickly for you, and she’s already standing over it, staring. You bend down, put your hands under his armpits and pull, and you very nearly drop him when you hear him croak out “Help.”

You look at your guard desperately, and she nods grimly, running back towards the town for aid. Carefully, you drag him out of the wreckage as he groans with pain, and you are sure to set him up far, far away from the drowned. He’s unconscious again by the time you get him there, breathing raggedly, and your eyes are watering and your heart is pounding wildly with a deep, visceral fear. You don’t know what to do. You have no idea what you should be doing, and he’s going to die because you couldn’t help him.

“You need to see,” a raspy voice says from behind you, and your heart nearly bursts out your chest, whirling around. It’s the guard, looking at you oddly and drenched with sea water, reeking of salt. “You need to fix what’s wrong.” A sob wracks your body; you can’t do this, you never could, and you can’t even fathom as to why she thinks you could.

“You need to see,” she says again, insistently, and you want to scream. You eye up the guard before you frantically, trying to find whatever it is she’s even seeing, and somehow, despite your eyes watering, you find a dent in his armor going inwards. It’s not too, too deep, but you have no idea how long he’s been out here, or how long this could have been hurting him. Hands still shaking, you clumsily tear at the straps of his armor until you can pull it off completely, tossing it aside. His body is heavily bruised, and there’s a nasty-looking open wound just under his ribs, where the dent was. The smell coming from it is thick and cloying, black blood flowing anew now that the armor is not acting as a makeshift stopper and you have to fight not to vomit from the mere sight of it.

You just- you need to get it to stop bleeding, you need to get the wound to shut, you need to get rid of the sickness that has taken to it and made him its home, and without thinking, you press your hands to the wound, against the sludge of dried, black blood and flesh reforming wrong. Heat forms under your palms, in your veins and behind your eyes, and all that fills your mind is fire and smoke. You are consumed with it, stomach filled with coal and smoke in your throat, and you reel back, screeching with pain as something scorches your hands with a loud hiss. You open your eyes, and your palms are smoking, pulsing with heat and agony, and the wound is seared shut.

The wound is seared shut.

You stare in disbelief and a distant horror, tears rolling down your face as your hands continue to throb. You look over to the guard and she’s- she’s not there.

Instead, coming over the hill is the cart, sun sinking low on the horizon, and once the other guards see you as you are, hands smoking and hunched over a man whose blood is still everywhere, they rush over.

You’re still scared out of your mind, but you still can’t help feeling childish when you are taken aside by a healer while the guards begin to load up the cart without you. The healer, a shaman you think, is an older orc, work-roughened hands still gentle and kind as a grandparent’s as she shushes you quietly and shushes the guards that try to ask you what happened when there are still tears streaming down your cheeks.

“I’ll take care of it,” she says firmly.

She checks over the guard you found, clicking her tongue at the wound scorched shut, but still says, “He’ll live,” as she sorts through the various satchels on her belt and begins cleaning him up with the herbs and bandages she pulls out. They’ve got him set up on a stretcher, now, canvas cloth between two wooden poles laying on the ground, and as the shaman works, humming to herself, the earth around them begins to look greener. You are safe, you think, so you tell them what happened, minus the appearance of the guard on the beach, and while they seem to have a hard time believing that you did that all by yourself, there isn’t really any evidence to the contrary.

After she gets him cleaned and bandaged up, two of the grunts lift up the stretcher, waiting for her to deal with you. She takes your hands gently, but you still flinch, expecting to be hurt. She chuckles at you, whispering something you cannot understand, and takes a water skin from her belt, pouring it over your outstretched palms. The water is stingingly cold, but when she finishes emptying the skin over your hands, they no longer throb with pain, not even a little bit. You blink in suspicion at this, and she merely chuckles again, ruffling your hair.

The innkeeper is absolutely beside himself when he hears what happened.

\---

The next day is the last day you go back to the beach, and this time, decidedly not alone, the search party having gone well, apparently. Also, the innkeeper had thrown the biggest fit you’ve ever seen at the guard captain, which you think might have helped. There are already people combing the beach by the time you get there, and the work goes much faster this way. You are wary of so many people in one place, but you can get through it for now, you think. You are able to extend your efforts further down the beach, and something draws you to the skeleton of a ship that was pushed ashore.

You hadn’t really been interested in it before, but now you find yourself walking towards it for reasons you can’t quite explain. It’s half in the water, still, the waves lapping against it passively, and you take off your shoes and wade in. The ship had been broken in half, at least, this being the front-most piece and its insides open to the water. You peer in, and just as you suspected, for some reason, a corpse lay floating there in the water, half rotted away and eaten by fish. It must have been there for days; the fish are startled away by your presence, and you are compelled to pull out the remains.

The smell is something so awful you can’t even begin to describe it, but that doesn’t stop you from grabbing them by the remains of their arms and gently tugging them through the water. When you get to the shore, finally, you flip them onto their back, giving them at least that dignity so they’re not face down in the sand, and you nearly swallow your own tongue when you see their face.

It’s the guard that helped you, bags under her eyes prominent, and thick, black hair falling out of its braid.

When you burn the body, on a massive funeral pyre with the rest, you hear a gasp from the fire that sounds like “thank you.”


End file.
